Gods and Warriors (8 page)

P
irra heard the splash on the other side of the hull and pictured the dolphin plunging back into the Sea. She knew it was a dolphin because she’d heard the sailors shouting, but she couldn’t see it. She wasn’t allowed.

It was hot in the hold and it stank of almonds and sick. She couldn’t move. The cargo was crammed in around her and the deck was only a hand’s breadth above her face.

Her throat tightened with panic. She gulped air, but couldn’t get enough. If the ship went down, she’d drown.

Don’t think about it. The Sea is calm. We’re not going to sink.

Clutching her sealstone, she lay listening to the slap of rigging and the creak of timbers. They’d been sailing forever, the ship rolling nauseatingly from side to side. She’d been sick over a bale of linen. It was too dark to make sure, but she hoped it was her mother’s best. Serve her right for shutting her in the hold.

Until yesterday Pirra had never even seen the Sea, and if the High Priestess had had her way, she still wouldn’t have, because as part of her punishment she’d been blindfolded
when Userref had carried her on board. But just before they’d put her in the hold, he’d broken the rules and unbound her eyes, to give her a glimpse.

She’d grown up with pictures of the Sea. It was painted on the walls of her room: neat blue waves zigzagged with yellow sunlight, and smiling dolphins nosing tidy little fishes, while big-eyed octopuses clambered about on the bottom, among sea urchins and crinkly green weeds.

The real Sea was nothing like that. Pirra had never imagined it would be so restless and so huge.

All her life she’d heard stories of the world outside, but she’d never been there. She’d grown up in the House of the Goddess: an entire hillside covered in chambers, courtyards, storerooms, cookhouses, and workshops, where people swarmed like bees. She called it the stone hive, and she’d never been allowed out.

She couldn’t see anything from her room, which gave on to a shadowy passage, but sometimes she managed to escape her slaves, and then she would race across the Great Court and up the stairs to the topmost balcony. From there she could look down over olive groves and vineyards, across barley fields and forests, to the great twin-horned Mountain of the Earthshaker.

When you’re twelve, she would tell herself, you’re getting out. You’ll drive a chariot and climb the Mountain, and have a dog.

Knowing this had made it bearable. Yassassara had promised: When she was twelve, she would be free.

The night before she turned twelve, she was so excited, she couldn’t sleep.

The next morning she learned the truth.

“But you
promised
!” she’d screamed at her mother. “You promised I’d be
free
!”

“No,” Yassassara had calmly replied. “I promised I’d let you out. And so I will. Today you leave the House of the Goddess: to sail to Lykonia to be wed.”

Pirra had raged and bitten and screamed—but deep down, she’d known it was useless. High Priestess Yassassara had a will of granite. She’d ruled Keftiu for seventeen years, and she would sacrifice anything to keep it strong, including her only daughter.

In the end, Pirra had gone quiet. In sullen silence she’d let the women dress her in purple linen spangled with gold, and when Userref had come in, she’d ignored him. Even he, who was like a big brother, had betrayed her. He’d been part of the lie.

“I’m sorry,” he’d said quietly. “I wasn’t allowed to tell you.”

“How long have you known?” she’d said without looking at him.

“The harvest before last.”

“That’s
two years.
”

He didn’t reply.

“So that’s why you were so keen that we learn Akean,” she’d said bitterly. “You said it’d be fun to learn it from the old man in the weavers’ shed; you said it’d be ‘something to do.’”

“I thought it’d help if you could speak their tongue.”

“You let me go on believing I’d be free.”

Frowning, he’d smoothed his kilt over his knees. “You needed something to hope for,” he’d muttered. “Everyone does. It’s what keeps them going.”

“Even if it’s a lie?”

“Yes. Even then.”

Coldly, she’d sent him away, but after he’d gone she realized that he’d been speaking of himself. He’d been ten when he was snatched from Egypt and sold as a slave to the House of the Goddess. That had been thirteen years ago, but he’d never stopped wanting to go home.

Uncomfortably, Pirra shifted position in the hold. Userref had given her a waterskin, so she’d managed to wash off the worst of the sick; but the smell was thick in her nostrils, and she kept finding bits between her teeth.

In the gloom she made out the gifts intended for the Chieftain of Lykonia as her bride-price: man-high jars of strong black wine and bales of richly dyed linen; alabaster vials of perfumed oil that stank of almonds; ingots of the all-important tin. Pirra’s heart fluttered angrily against her ribs. She’d been packed in among them like part of the cargo.

Her mother had known exactly what she was doing when she’d punished her daughter for daring to protest. Pirra was cramped and humiliated, but not really in danger; and her mother had given orders that when they reached Lykonia, they would make land away from the coastal
settlements, so that Pirra could be let out and cleaned up well before the Chieftain set eyes on her.

Before they’d left Keftiu, Userref had tried to reassure her. “I’ll be there too,” he’d said. “You won’t be on your own.”

She clung to that. But when she thought of the future, she couldn’t breathe.

All she knew about Akea was that it was a long way north of Keftiu, and peopled by warlike savages who couldn’t be trusted—and that Lykonians lived in the south, and were the roughest of the lot. Akeans didn’t build Houses of the Goddess, and they weren’t ruled by priestesses; instead they had Chieftains with strongholds. That was where she would live, in a stronghold. Her mother said she would stay in it for the rest of her life, and only leave it when she was carried to her tomb.

Panic rose in her throat. From one stone prison to another…

“Let me out!” she cried, beating the planks with her fists.
“Let me out!”

Nobody came.

You’re not here,
she told herself fiercely.
You’re not in the hold of a ship, you’re out in the sky with that falcon.

Squeezing her eyes shut, she tried to go back to the moment when Userref had slipped off the blindfold, and she’d stood on the deck, blinking in the glare.

That first sight of the Sea. The white doves fluttering on the golden shore, the green sails billowing in a sky of limitless blue.

That was when she’d seen it. One moment she’d been craning her neck at the clouds—and the next, she’d heard a sound like tearing silk, and a bolt of darkness had come hurtling out of the Sun.

In awe she’d watched it swoop upon the doves. They’d scattered, but it flew too fast, and in the blink of an eye it struck; then it eased out of the dive in a graceful curve and flew off with leisurely wingbeats, a dead dove dangling from one talon.

“What
was
that?” she’d breathed.

Userref had bowed to the dwindling black speck.
“Heru,”
he’d murmured, lapsing into his native tongue. “May He live for all time and eternity.”

“It came out of the Sun,” mumbled Pirra. “Where—where does it live?”

“Anywhere. Everywhere. It’s a falcon.”

To live wherever you wanted. To go wherever you liked… “I never saw anything so fast,” she said.

“You never will. Falcons are the fastest creatures in the world.”

Huddled in the hold, Pirra ran her fingers over her sealstone. It was an amethyst engraved with a tiny bird that she used to think was a sparrow; but now she knew it was a falcon.

Suddenly she caught her breath. She pictured herself perched like a falcon on the mast of the ship—then spreading her wings and flying away.

Until now, she’d never thought about escape. She
had believed her mother’s lie: that soon she would be free. But what if—what if she could get away?

Excitement kindled inside her. Her thoughts began to race.

Even if she did escape, she’d never survive on her own in a strange land; so that meant she had to get back to Keftiu—which meant putting an end to this match with the son of the Lykonian Chieftain.

But how?

Then it came to her. At the Feast of Green Barley, her mother had found a crack in one of the offering vessels. “Get rid of it,” she’d said with disdain, and a slave had taken it and flung it over the outer wall. Pirra had climbed to the upper balcony and spotted it lying in a clump of poppies. She’d envied it. It was flawed, but it had gotten away.

At the time, she hadn’t thought any further than that. But now…

Damaged things had no value in the House of the Goddess. Damaged things got away.

She was jolted out of her plans by a change in the ship’s motion. It was no longer rolling from side to side, but bobbing up and down. She heard men calling to each other, and loud grinding sounds; she guessed that was the oars being pulled in. Suddenly the planks above her were being levered aside, and she was taking great gulps of salty air, and Userref was reaching down to pull her out.

The Sun was blinding. She heard the splash of surf and the cawing of a crow. “Are we—is this L-Lykonia?” she stammered.

Userref’s grip tightened on her hand. “Be brave, Pirra,” he said. “This is your new home.”

T
he crow in the thorn tree stared at Hylas with bright, unfriendly eyes.

“Go ’way,” he panted.

The crow laughed at him. In the time he took to wipe the sweat off his face, it could fly as far as he’d come all day. The coast was a tangle of spiny yellow gorse and mastic scrub that gave off an eye-watering smell of tar, and the glare was merciless. He’d long since emptied his waterskin. The Sea was taunting him: So much water, and nothing to drink.

He was furious with himself for losing the raft. He’d only left it for a while to scout out the coast, but when he’d returned the Sea had taken it, carrying it out of reach across the waves. Since then he’d been struggling over one rocky headland after another.

We’ll find a boat and follow the coast,
Telamon had said,
then make land on the other side and head in from there.

Find a boat? How? Apart from a few shepherds’ huts on the hills, there were no signs of people. And this was the third day that Issi had been alone in the mountains.

Again the crow laughed. Hylas lobbed a stone at it. The crow lifted into the sky and flew away—purposefully, as if carrying a message.

Hylas wished he hadn’t thrown that stone.